Category: Geekery

Somebody doesn’t quite understand how to configure their spamming software…

Saw this one in the comment spam for this blog: (the name of the product and other details elided)

{To my surprise|As it turned out}, {I stumbled upon|I ran across|I stumbled onto} {this program|this system|the program|this method|the deal|this product} by XXXX XXXXX. “XXXX XXXXX!” {caught|captured} my attention. {At first|In the beginning|Initially|At the beginning} {I was|I had been|I’d been} {baffled|confused|puzzled} by the name of the program. {But|However} as I read along, {I was|I had been|I became} convinced that {it could|it might|it may|it could possibly|it may possibly|it could actually|it would|it will|it may well|it will probably|it will possibly|it would likely|it can|may well|may possibly} {help me|assist me}. I’ve been {following the|following a|pursuing the|using the} {program|system|method|technique} {for 2|for two|for just two} weeks now. {Saying that|Stating that|Stating} I’m {seeing|experiencing|discovering|finding|witnessing|observing|having} results is an understatement! {The results|The outcomes} {are amazing|are fantastic}! Never {in my|during my} life did {I think|I believe} {that there|there} {would be a|will be a|has to be|has got to be} {solution to|treatment for} my XXXX {woes|problems|worries|issues|troubles} until {I found|I discovered|I came across|I ran across|I stumbled upon} “XXXX XXXXX!”

Possibly spoke too soon

USB drive was frozen up this morning. Possibly the unexpected power down yesterday (guys hooking up my gas grill threw the wrong breaker and powered down my office as well as the furnace) reset the hdparm parameter, or it wasn’t an inopportune spin-down that caused the freeze up. Just in case, I removed the pm-tools package to prevent the system from trying to do any power management (I hope).

Another glitch…

After my wipe and reinstall experiment, there are still a few little glitches (above and beyond the fact that I’m still running my RAID1 in degraded state because the disk it’s supposed to be mirroring to is being replaced). One of the most annoying was my hourly “rsync to the external hard drive” – my own home grown equivalent to “Time Machine”. About once a day it was freezing up, usually during the first big access to the drive, which is a “rm -rf” on the destination directory. And once it froze up, it really froze up – there would be dozens and sometimes hundreds of processes that wouldn’t end and couldn’t be killed, most the hdparm and smartctl commands that munin issues to detect the drive status and temperature. The only way to get those processes to end was the turn off the external USB cradle. This didn’t happen before, so I don’t know what’s going on. But I suspected that something is being more aggressive about spinning down idle external drives, so I issued the command “hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdd” and that seems to have solved the problem.

Other glitches – the dvd player application exits as soon as you start it. Also, I just had a notification in the system notifications area that there were upgrades to install, so I clicked it and it brought up the updater app, but when I clicked “Install all updates” it told me it couldn’t because I hadn’t authenticated. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to prompt for your password and authenticate you first. So I installed them from the command line using aptitude. Nothing I can’t live with.

Well, that didn’t last long

A few hours after my last post, as I slept not very soundly, the hard disk that kept dropping out of the RAID as it rebuilt dropped again. This morning, I booted in the the Seagate “SEATools” disk and gave it a full on test, and it found a metric buttload of bad sectors. Not good on a brand new disk, so off to the RMA process I go. The machine is up and running again, with /dev/md128 running as a “degraded RAID 1” (ie a single drive with no mirror).

Does anybody else find it pretty shitty that the vendor can ship you a defective drive, and then make you pay for the shipping to return it? Or that they won’t ship the replacement until they get the old one back? Seems to me that they could ship a replacement immediately with the proviso that they’ll charge your credit card for the drive if you don’t return the old one.

A new start

I decided I needed some more room on my home Linux box, so I bought a couple of 2TB disks. I also decided it was time to do a wipe and re-install because the box has been upgraded many times and there are several things that just don’t work right any more. So I burned a bunch of different distros onto CDs and experimented with them, and decided that Kubuntu is the best combination of beauty and power. None of the other distros except Debian allows you to set up lvm on RAID-1 while installing, and Debian looks like a bit of a dogs breakfast compared to Kubuntu, even in KDE.

The two new disks are so big that as it is, I’m only using them for the new installation, so the I can mount the old system under /old_system and I can compare everything to make sure I haven’t lost any important configuration. But eventually I’ll be able to delete those partitions and add them back to the free pool in the LV and use them to expand any of the actual in-use partitions. I love lvm.

Installation has gone ok, I’ve got about 3/4s of the things I need to get working again working again, but I’ve hit the usual string of snags. The biggest is that one of the two new disks keeps dropping out of the RAID1, so I have to keep adding it back in. I’ve rejiggered all the cables as best as I can, and hopefully it will rebuild overnight and it will be ok. Fingers crossed, I’m off to bed.